Yellow Fever Leaves Deadly Mark On Region

Opinion - Osceola's history

October 10, 1999|By Jim Robison

Every fall during the mid-1800s, hundreds of lumbermen sailed south to labor in the St. Johns River valley's forests and live in the shanty camps until the late spring when the heat, yellow fever and mosquitoes drove them out.

These ``live-oakers'' earned every penny of the $10 to $28 a month they received in wages for their toil to bring down the mighty trees needed for shipbuilding.

Florida history is filled with references to ``Florida fever'' and ``swamp fever.'' Yellow fever, malaria and related diseases carried by mosquitoes downed many Army soldiers as well as famed Seminole leader Osceola, who finally allowed himself to be captured when he could no longer fight off illness.

Another of the fever victims was a lieutenant who had befriended Osceola.

Second Lt. John Graham, a Pennsylvania-born graduate of the U.S. Military Academy's Class of 1834, struck a friendship with Osceola during truce talks. The officer gave one of Osceola's daughters a dress. The Seminole returned the favor with a gift of a plume of white crane feathers as a badge of protection.

Seminole oral tradition says Osceola gave orders for his warriors not to fire upon Graham, a very big man who would have been an easy mark.

Osceola, made ill by the same diseases that killed far more soldiers than Seminole fighting, was dying from fevers that could have been from chronic malaria when captured and taken to prison at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island near Charleston, S.C. He died in late January 1838.

Graham later served as inspector general of the state militia. In 1841 he married Janet Reid, the widowed daughter of territorial Gov. Robert Raymond Reid. His wife had inherited Blackwood Plantation near Tallahassee. It would be the place of Graham's death on July 30, 1841. Graham, his wife, her sister and his wife's daughter from her first marriage died of yellow fever within a month of each other.

Also among the more than 400 people who died during that yellow fever outbreak in Tallahassee was Reid, who as a Democratic governor survived the often violent political struggles with the Whigs, who controlled Florida politics in the late 1830s.

One of the worst statewide yellow fever outbreaks struck during the summer of 1887, the year the state created Osceola County from portions of Orange and Brevard. Part of the the reason people can live here today is the dredging and draining that took place when Osceola County was brand new.

Railroad baron Henry Plant wanted to build a large hotel on one of the islands in Lake Tohopekaliga, but his efforts resulted in nothing but frustrations. Kissimmee, the railroad's southernmost terminus, already had the Tropical Hotel, which at the time was the largest of these railroad hotels south of Jacksonville.

Instead of an island resort, Plant shifted his interests to Tampa Bay, where the population was dwindling because of two decades of recurring yellow fever epidemics. Seven months after acquiring the South Florida Railroad in 1884, Plant accomplished what others said was impossible - he completed the route linking Kissimmee and Tampa.

Florida even has ties to the medical breakthrough that finally brought yellow fever under control. Florida was the Army's staging area when it massed forces for the Spanish-American War for control of Cuba in 1898. All those soldiers coming through Florida on railroad cars is what gave a veterans organization the idea of chartering St. Cloud after the war.

A Cuban scientist is credited with the early research into the causes of the yellow fever virus. Working in Havana in 1881, Carlos Juan Finlay linked the disease to a mosquito later identified as the Aedes aegypti. But it was the yellow fever casualties during the Spanish-American War that led Army Maj. Walter Reed and his associates to prove that the Aedes aegypti mosquito carried the bug that cause yellow fever. That research led to massive efforts to eradicate the mosquito.